


who we are on the other side

by dysphoria_of_being



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, hate sex is great sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-02 19:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8679784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dysphoria_of_being/pseuds/dysphoria_of_being
Summary: Set immediately after the end of the war, at the end of seventh year.





	1. Chapter 1

Harry 'the Chosen Boy Who Lived and Saved the Wizarding World and Finally Got Sick of All These Stupid Titles' Potter never seemed to get enough sleep.

At first it was the night terrors, wringing hoarse screams from his throat like an alarm every hour, on the hour, reminding him that he hadn't done enough mourning during his wakefulness. There should be no blissful oblivion for the Boy Who Lived; even in the death he had once tried on, he still couldn't earn that sweet opiate of reprieve from consciousness. Even in death, Harry had still been forced to reconcile with his life before coming right back to it.

Not a reasonable task, these days, on so little sleep.

Then it was the little noises of the house at night-- creaking floorboards, settling walls, portraits coughing or snoring-- even the slightest shift in the air would rouse him from a murky and unsatisfying slumber, wand at the ready in his hand before his groggy brain even caught up. He set wards, he experimented with new muffling spells, he moved rooms twice a week... none of these efforts eased his senses enough to believe that there was no longer anything _coming for him,_ anymore. His body breathed on high-alert, and not even two full months of perfectly uninterrupted solitude had dampened those honed reflexes.

He began to look wan, frayed around the edges, thinner than ever. Harry was a man, now; the malnourishment and visible neglect of his boyhood could not hold a candle to how gaunt the angles of his ovular, aged face grew. No matter how many meals Mrs. Weas-- Molly sent over, no matter how many plates Kreacher set imploringly in front of him, Harry seemed to be losing weight in direct correlation to every hour of lost sleep.

Sometimes it had nothing to do with external factors at all, nor dreams-- sometimes he couldn't even reach the state of _having_ dreams. He simply tossed and turned for hours of perpetual vigilance to this thing inside him, this low-dragging, deep-gravity ache between his ribs that weighed him down so much he sank halfway through every mattress, every cushion he tried like some kind of queer reverse Princess and the Pea, until he took to laying on the floor just for something hard enough to hold him in place.

If he attempted sleep in one of the many beds, he'd wake himself up screaming, imagining his scar to be searing with phantom pain that no longer had a source; if he tried the threadbare couches, he'd start upright to hex a skittering mouse or jinx a particularly shifty-looking doorframe; if he took the floor, all he could do was cover his eyes with the crook of his arm and listen to the grandfather clock knocking off each hour with sixty tiny gunshot wounds.

The bags under his eyes became bruises. His hands shook all the time, even when performing such simple tasks as pouring tea.

The truth was, Harry didn't know how to believe that it was really over. He _knew_ Voldemort was dead-- oh sure, he had the inside scoop on that proof-positive fact, since he was coincidentally the very person who'd shuffled Lord Thingy _off--_ but he didn't know how to _feel_ this fact. If he were honest with himself, Harry had no idea what relief felt like at all.

His entire life had been plagued by constant enemies, whether in the form of abusive adoptive relatives or psychotic murderous supervillains with preternatural powers, and now that he was technically free of all of it, Harry didn't know _what_ to feel. He didn't know who he was outside of what he'd been forced to rebel against; he was a piecemeal person composed only of reactions to a reality he'd never been able to control, and suddenly he'd just been handed control over everything around him.

So how could he possibly sleep, when he had no idea who would be waking up in his body at the end of it? Harry knew how to face the end, oh yes-- he was brilliant at The End.

He'd just never expected to outlive it.

  


* * *

  


He absolutely could _not_ stay at the Burrow. They were overcrowded enough as it was, what with all the still-living Weasley children come back home for summer holidays and the whole wizarding world's Hey We Weren't Actually Destroyed, How About That general celebrations, busy sorting everything out as one big, fucking miserable family, and although they were the closest thing Harry'd ever had to a real family, he still felt awkward and outcast amongst their unique brand of grief. He couldn't comfort Ron, not after everything they'd been through, certainly not better than Hermione; he couldn't bear to face the way Ginny _looked_ at him, as if waiting for something inside him to change just so it could catch up with her. And seeing George by himself was driving Harry out of his goddamn mind. 

He couldn't _process_ it, just could not wrap his head around the fact that Fred would not be popping into view a moment later, that Fred had ever actually been real in the first place and not a clever reflective illusion George had been perfecting since he emerged from the womb, that George was just one person now, that someone was even missing. Harry knew, academically, that _Fred_ was missing, but the problem seemed to be that George filled this Fred-shaped hole so precisely that it was hard for Harry to see it was there. Maybe all he'd really lost was the backup copy, but still had the original.

Harry didn't know how to handle thoughts like that, mad thoughts, ruthless and cynical thoughts, so he didn't try. Just took himself someplace where he wasn't compelled to think them. He'd begun to consider the house Sirius had bequeathed to him not as its number or street name, but rather as Someplace Else, which was the only place left he could belong. The Boy Who Lived Someplace Else. Always an outsider, for one reason or another-- not even allowed a home for himself, but just a Someplace Else where he could know he was present by virtue of being relegated there from the other places that had names and lives beyond serving a single outdated purpose that was now finished. Still just reacting to other people and circumstances.

So Harry 'the Boy Who Lived and Kept on Living and Just Wouldn't Bloody Die' Potter turned eighteen, and Hogwarts reopened. The physical damage had been repaired, Professor McGonagall had become Headmistress McGonagall, and the whole rest of the world spun on as yet another new crop of first-years received their invitations by owl. Harry received his by floo, since Someplace Else at 12 Grimmauld had very few windows and Harry could not bear the thought of replacing Hedwig.

_You are invited to return to Hogwarts for an optional eighth year, the letter read, in order to sit your N.E.W.T.s and receive final marks as relevant to your chosen future career. Your classroom instruction will resume where it was left off before Hogwarts fell into the hands of Death Eaters last year._

He had no intentions of attending, not this time, not anymore, but Harry still kept that letter constantly on his person, clutching it in his pocket or checking it every so often throughout the day. Hogwarts itself was not the content of the letter that kept him transfixed; rather, it was the casual mention of Death Eaters that made Harry so eager to reread that parchment over and over again. Each time he read the final sentence, he felt closer to his old self than he had in months.

It brought Death Eaters back into the present with him, made them feel relevant again, seemed like something Harry might've read when he'd had a genuine enemy to react against. He still took the Daily Prophet, also delivered by floo, so that he could keep up with the criminal trials and hearings sure to go on for years, but every issue of the wizarding paper was printed in such finite terms of past and present that there could be no doubt the war was over, because apparently everyone in the entire country besides Harry 'Raised for This' Potter wanted to put it all behind them.

Everyone but those on trial, more accurately. Harry supposed it wasn't the only similarity he shared with Voldemort's ex-followers, now that he had no friends and school or adrenaline-fueled adventure to distract him from admitting these reluctant truths to himself. He had, after all, been just about as obsessed with Voldemort as the Death Eaters were, albeit for different reasons. He'd carried a bloody piece of the Dark Lord's _soul_ inside his body, for god's sake-- a predicament (or an honor, depending on the perspective) that no one else in the world had shared.

So he _couldn't_ go back to school, not like this, not amongst all his friends and comrades and fellow survivors, because he knew he would be more isolated than ever. While they'd all be trying to move on, picking up the pieces and reassembling them into something like a normal life, Harry would be _missing_ too many pieces to make sense of what they might re-form. During previous years of feeling so separate, and indeed being so different, from his peers, Harry had at least had a sense of purpose, a vital direction for his efforts in alienation. He used to be able to thoroughly believe, or even just pretend, that his preoccupation with fighting evil had all been for the greater good.

But the other students at Hogwarts -- even those who had been most deeply entrenched in the battle, those returning for an extra year in order to complete their woefully stunted educations -- viewed the war as an _interruption_ rather than a way of life. Hogwarts, where he'd started fighting the war before it even became a proper one, had been Harry's way of life-- the only thing he'd ever known of his birthright. Now that Voldemort was defeated, Harry wasn't sure he could return to those familiar hallways and somehow not see nefarious plots unfolding all around him. Now that the greater good had won, Harry had nothing left in his life to conceal the fact that his preoccupation with fighting _anything_ meant there was something _wrong_ with him.

  


* * *

  


So Harry 'I Am the Most Specialest' Potter went to the Ministry instead. He had no qualifications on paper to speak of, save a few successful O.W.L.s, and while everyone seemed to appreciate him with excited handshakes and back-thumps and congratulations, nobody actually seemed to _respect_ him. They viewed him as an _icon,_ a bleeding _symbol_ of their cause, or worse-- a fucking _accident,_ like his defeat of Voldemort was something Voldemort had brought upon himself, so Harry wasn't even allowed to take responsibility for his most triumphant actions. He was still just a _reaction_ to something else, a whirling top set to spinning by someone else's hand and spinning back and back, crashing helplessly, _accidentally_ against other people's wills until he was nothing but shattered glass, spewing shards in all directions because he couldn't stop spinning until that sinking gravity inside him finally took him down. Because Dumbledore was no longer there to pick him up and tuck him safely back inside his case until next time his cord was ripped. Because a boy of eighteen could be a hero, but he certainly couldn't be a freedom fighter.

And nobody had better get too close while Harry 'the Shattered Glass Whirling Top' Potter was in spin, because they might catch a faceful of his errant shards.

Well, he wouldn't subject his friends to that, but he sure didn't mind if the leftover shambles of the Ministry was the place where he finally exploded. More than anything, they wanted _rules_ right now; it had always been their way and it was all they could see for the rebuilding. Rules for everything: what to do, how and when to do it, who to see about getting it done, what _not_ to do, why it couldn't be done, and most importantly, where to file the correct paperwork. Harry couldn't be an Auror because he had not completed Auror training; he couldn't join the young ranks of the Auror Academy to receive training because he didn't have the necessary N.E.W.T.s; he couldn't return to Hogwarts in order to achieve those N.E.W.T.s because if he didn't accidentally kill another student out of misguided paranoia, he might just kill himsef.

No one seemed to know what to do with the Boy Who Should've Died in Service to His Country and Almost Did But Then Didn't -- for the Ministry could not ignore what made Harry a hero -- but Shacklebolt was still acting minister and trusted Harry's opinion, at the very least, so they found a temporary place for him. A Someplace Else where nobody in their right mind would want to go unless they absolutely had to be there: the courtrooms.

Maybe Harry wasn't allowed to _do_ anything under Ministry sanctions, but he sure as hell had been present for most of the major events of the war, so he could at least act as witness. A boy beholden to the actions of others is certainly fit to recount them on trial.

It got him out of the house.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry 'He'd Better Not Hate You' Potter had given testimony at fifteen different hearings -- mostly attesting to the presence of each Death Eater at Voldemort's secret meetings, where Harry once had a front-row seat behind the Dark Lord's own eyes, thereby making it quite difficult for many prisoners to earn favor by turning each other over to the Wizengamot -- before they put Lucius Malfoy in front of him.

The Malfoys had been apprehended attempting to flee the country to one of their numerous estates overseas; their Gringotts accounts had been frozen; their known landholdings had been seized. Lucius looked more like a ruined shell of a man than Harry's own reflection did, Harry thought, watching the wizard bailiff manually tightening each knob on the courtroom cage, driving those vicious iron arrowpoints ever closer to Lucius's sallow skin.

Lucius could no longer maintain his trademark haughty expression; unshaven and sagging with misery, he barely even glanced around at his accusors. His icy eyes, once so biting and cruel, now stared forward blankly, vague and glazed-- until he caught sight of Harry Potter. In the single moment that could have meant his salvation, for Harry was feeling a strange wave of pity for this broken person he knew _so well,_ Lucius might have begged or whimpered or sought to appeal to Harry's better nature -- the very thing Lucius had previously so condescended -- like the selfish manipulator he was, like a man desperate not to return to prison in any kind of permanent capacity. Instead, he chose to focus the last of his remaining hatred and digust and rage into the face of the Boy Who Ruined Malfoy's Life.

Lucius Malfoy fucking _snarled_ at him, and it made Harry _furious._

It was the fury that did it for him-- familiar, trustworthy, enveloping him like a warm cloak of righteousness, of _this is the way it should be._ He described the night Lucius had held Harry and Ron hostage in his own dungeons and allowed Hermione to be tortured for information with the intention of offering them up to Voldemort like a three-course meal; he recounted the battle in the Department of Mysteries, of which Lucius had been such a major component; he recalled the cause behind the disaster of the Chamber of Secrets, for which Lucius had been entirely responsible. "Before Voldemort had even risen to power!" Harry crowed angrily, "Malfoy wasn't even acting on orders, he nearly killed a first-year girl at Hogwarts of his own accord!"

Maybe it didn't settle quite right in Harry's conscience, sending such a pathetic man to a fate worse than death for sheer vengeance, but it wasn't like anything Harry told the Wizengamot was a _lie._ Lucius really had done all those things, and was very likely responsible for many deaths during the Battle of Hogwarts. He was a _terrible person._ He should be _punished for his crimes._ And most importantly of all, in the back of Harry's mind, Lucius was an _enemy._

Harry knew what to do about those.

There were plenty of other testimonies, of course; it seemed that the only redeeming choices Lucius had ever made were simply to do nothing at all, after his wand and authority within the Death Eater circle had been stripped from him. He was a pureblood elitist through-and-through, who only began to disagree with his Dark Lord when Voldemort stopped _treating_ him so well, _not_ because he repented his beliefs. Lucius Malfoy didn't change his mind, he just grew fearful and weak.

He'd been a Death Eater of high status, and still seemed willing to start another bloodfeud against muggle-borns if given the chance; the court was convinced. A life sentence at Azkaban. Lucius never showed the slightest sense of remorse, only a pleading panic of self-preservation-- regret that he'd been _caught,_ that his deeds had finally been revealed and the House of Malfoy, one of the oldest wizarding families in the world, might fall. _Two down,_ Harry thought bitterly as they lowered a shuddering, terror-stricken Lucius back into the bowels of the holding room below. After Sirius, after Bellatrix, Harry had believed the House of Black -- the only other ancient wizarding family he knew -- had already fallen.

And then they put Narcissa Malfoy, née Black, in front of him.

While it was true that Voldemort routinely abused his own followers, Harry figured most of them deserved it. He felt no pity for people like Fenrir Greyback, would not have given them mercy if he had the sole right to offer it, no matter what Dumbledore might've said, but Narcissa...

Narcissa Malfoy was a mother. Harry had never seen confirmation she attended any of Voldemort's meetings until the parasitic serpent had infested her own house, Malfoy Manor-- likely the doing of Lucius, not Narcissa. She had simply been present for several of Harry's more harrowing memories, not participating but rather focused on her son's wellbeing. She quite easily proved that she never bore the Dark Mark. Of the two total occasions when Harry had interacted with her personally, Narcissa had spent one of them insulting and threatening him and the other literally saving his life. The first occasion may have been a nasty argument, but Harry generously blamed this on Draco's presence; Narcissa was roused to defend her son. Truly loving motherhood seemed to be the primary characteristic she never failed to demonstrate, and Harry, who sorely craved such a figure in his own life, could appreciate that. He had Snape's memory of the Unbreakable Vow to prove it.

The second occasion, when Narcissa lied straight to Voldemort's mutated face, may have been motivated by a desire to move on the castle and rescue her son, but her defiance had been instrumental in winning the war. The Boy Who Lived had continued to do so because of it. Harry would not soon forget that, nor would he allow the court to overlook it.

Only one year in Azkaban, so that she might learn the error of her family's pureblood-elitist ways. She'd be out come next autumn, a free woman. It was a lenient sentence for someone who had been proven, with incontrovertible evidence, to keep the company of Voldemort for so long-- mostly Harry's doing. He was feeling rather proud of himself, like this made up for his revenge against Lucius, like he still truly was Dumbledore's man, when they put Draco Malfoy in front of him.

 

* * *

 

Draco looked hollowed-out, utterly.  He'd been spoiled into softness by his doting mother, misled into delusion by his arrogant father, forced into an impossible position by an evil dictator who had intended him to fail and eagerly planned to murder him for it, and then rescued from a horrible death that had claimed one of his only friends by the very boyhood nemesis who had spent the last seven years making his life miserable.  Who was now gazing down at him with a kind of absent shock, ready to provide the testimony that would send him to prison alongside his parents.  Draco had just lost his father forever, his mother for now; if he hadn't been of age, he would on that very day have legally become an orphan.  He expected to be locked up.

He caught Harry's bewildered green eyes with a glance, exactly as Lucius had done, but unlike his father, unlike _himself_ for the entire time Harry had known him, Draco did not glare or sneer or affect a conceited expression.  He did not snivel.  He simply regarded Harry with the same dull, slightly morose blank look he had perfected during their sixth year, and then looked away.  Draco already believed himself well and truly done for; there was no point belaboring the conflict any longer.

He only hoped they'd choose a cell for him near his mother's.

Throughout most of his trial, Draco barely spoke-- merely shrugged or nodded at the accusations, not even mustering a denial in his own defense.  He just wanted to get this over with.  Something about Malfoy's behavior, that... hopelessness, that _despair--_ Harry hated it.

Harry could not understand how his once-proud Hogwarts rival could seem so empty, could let himself sink so low.  No longer bothering even to _defend_ himself, something he used to do with gusto?  Vile and offensive as they may have been, where were the snide remarks Malfoy used to take such pleasure in delivering to all inferior ears?  Cowardly and pathetic as the behavior may have been, why wasn't he doing all he could to protect himself, to get himself out of this mess?  What had happened to Harry's _enemy?_

Where was the selfish enemy Harry had grown up with, obsessed over, known so intimately until now?  This brutalized, pallid boy in a crude medieval cage before him was not Draco Malfoy, he was a mistake.  Harry felt wrong witnessing this mistake, like they had both been side-apparated to the wrong place at the wrong time, one of them had a time-turner round his neck that got upset by the journey and spun too fast in the wrong direction and Harry thought surely it must've been Malfoy but then, without Malfoy as his enemy, where was he, who was _he?_

If _Draco Malfoy_ could be this broken now, what happened to Harry Potter?

The lead Inquisitor began inviting testimony and Harry leapt to his feet like he'd only just remembered he had legs.  All heads in the room turned towards his abrupt, unexpected motion, but the only thing Harry could see was Draco.  Did Malfoy see him _now?_

Yes-- yes, Malfoy's head had turned too.  All heads.  Why couldn't they just let him be one of them?

"You can't send him to Azkaban," Harry declared loudly in the awkward silence his jump had wrought.

"I beg your pardon?" the High Inquisitor replied.  Draco merely appeared confused.

"He--"  _He was just a boy,_ Harry wanted to argue, knew from extensive personal experience that this was the sort of argument these sorts of people in authority would want to hear, but if he pandered to their prejudices and biases, he would be admitting his own fallibility to that same argument-- because Harry Potter was, too, just a boy, only he'd had the good fortune of being born on the winning side.  Malfoy had been slated for this loss his whole life, and Harry realized from the look of him now that he _knew it._

"Mr. Potter?"

"He was underage," Harry said.  "For all of it."

"Draco Malfoy was _not_ underage when he received the Dark Mark."

"It-- it wasn't his fault.  It was his family!  You saw what his father was like--"

"Mr. Potter," the Inquisitor interrupted gently, but sternly, "you must have some form of evidence to present in order to--"

"He didn't turn me in!" Harry exclaimed rather desperately, his mind felt like it was grasping at straws even though he _knew_ this couldn't happen to Malfoy, he knew there were plenty of good reasons not to send an eighteen-year-old kid to wizard prison.  "That same night Lucius held me hostage, they were relying on Malf-- on Draco to identify me, and he knew it was me, but he didn't!  He kept saying 'I don't know, I don't know,' because--  Well, he was scared, wasn't he?  He couldn't just outright lie to them, his own cruel family, and Bellatrix Lestrange was _right there,_ she was absolutely _mad--"_

This time it was Malfoy himself who interrupted Harry.  "Potter," he muttered, like a warning, and Harry glared at him in surprise and distaste.

"You will speak when spoken to," the Inquisitor snapped at Draco, and to Harry's further confusion and disgust, Malfoy looked sufficiently cowed-- he ducked his head away as though he'd been struck and closed his mouth, but still those silvery eyes found Harry, and seemed to be imploring him against what every fiber of Harry's being was demanding he do.  "Now, Mr. Potter, you were saying--"

"Draco Malfoy saved my life," Harry replied, determined, holding Malfoy's gaze steadily.

There, _there_ was the sneer Harry remembered.  Malfoy shot him that sneer and it was like hope spilling over in his gut but then Malfoy just looked away, breaking their stare.  Harry figured it was a small victory, but he'd still won.

There was no one else present who could give evidence in testimony on Malfoy's behalf, but then, there didn't really need to be.  The word of the Boy Who'd Seen It All so Give Him Your Sympathy would suffice for the sentencing of another young boy, just a boy, who'd never actually committed any crimes save obeying his treacherous father.  Malfoy received the standard two-year probationary suspension for all those who bore the Dark Mark; he was stripped of his wand and heavily-warded against performing all but the most basic household spells.

So this, Harry realized, was what relief felt like.


	3. Chapter 3

Harry caught him as he was exiting the tribunal wing of the courtrooms floor, striding slowly, purposefully, sadly down the halls of the least-loved section in the entire Ministry building. A swarm of harrassed employees rushed out of the lift before Malfoy could board it, which gave Harry the moment he needed to shove past them and catch up, and then the lift had already closed without Malfoy on it, and they were alone in the deserted corridor. Harry used the pretense of panting for breath, as though racing all of the twenty meters it took to reach the elevators were somehow an exertion for a healthy young man, to cover the fact that he had no idea what to say.

Malfoy eyed him dubiously in silence, the only sound between them Harry's soft fake gasps echoing eerily around those cold marble walls. He worried the next bloody lift would rattle its way up and arrive before he could even figure out why he'd chased after Malfoy at all, let alone what he might say to his ex-nemesis turned charity case. He just couldn't let it end like that: exonerated in trial and then vanished from the rest of Harry's life, this person before him, this one person who'd been _there_ with him, in the thick of it, and through it too-- the one person who knew what it had meant to Harry because he'd suffered it from the other side, had been damaged by it in ways no one else, not Ron or Hermione or anyone who'd been _interrupted_ by the war, could understand. Malfoy was the closest thing to a Death Eater that Harry could reasonably stomach, and the Death Eaters were the closest thing to normal that he knew.

Too many things had ended in the flash of a wandstroke. Everything was slipping away. Harry wanted _something_ he could hold onto, grip as tightly as his hand might clench into a fist; something for his own.

He gave up the ruse and resumed breathing normally, and still neither of them spoke.

Besides, he'd done plenty of chasing after Malfoy before. He remembered the shape of the other boy's back better than his own shadow, these days.

They stared at each other.

"What will you do now?" was how Harry finally broke the protracted silence between them.

"What do you care?" Malfoy immediately snapped back, and the snide, prissy sound of it brought such a sudden flush of recited and practiced irritation across the back of Harry's neck that it almost tingled like pleasure, a sensation so automatic and real that it must've been right-- a reality Harry could cling to, like it was meant to be.

"I ought to know what you're planning," he retorted, "since I'm the one who sent you back out into the world."

"You think I owe you for that, Potter?"

"I--"

"You think I owe you a single thing simply for speaking the _truth?"_

The familiar way Malfoy was spitting his words with such derision, the comfortable anger that boiled warm and soothing in Harry's gut-- he whipped out his wand in a flash, like it was second nature, and brandished it threateningly in Draco's face.

Instead of flinching and cowering the way he used to, however, Draco merely maintained his cool, slate-grey gaze directly at Harry. "I owe you nothing," he muttered.

"You're a right git, Malfoy," Harry growled. "After everything I've done for you, this is the thanks I get?"

"Leave me alone, Potter." Draco turned his back on his childhood rival like they were mere strangers now, utterly _dismissing_ Harry-- it made Harry's skin prickle and itch. Malfoy was heading for another hallway, for a different lift, but this _wasn't over._

"Don't fucking walk away from me, Malfoy," Harry grated out through gritted teeth.

The low, dangerous quality in Harry's once-boyish voice, the unusual profanity-- these gave Malfoy pause, and he glanced back over his shoulder. "Watch me."

In respose, Harry sent a sharp bolt of electricity to the ground just beyond Malfoy's feet, a searing splinter of light that burst upon contact and spewed an array of sparks upward in a wide arc, forcing Malfoy to stagger backwards a few steps to avoid having his trouserleg ignited. "Fight back," Harry demanded with a triumphant smugness in his tone.

"You _watched_ them take my wand, Potter," Malfoy reminded him scornfully, "What am I supposed to do, insult you to death?" He snorted out a bitter scoff and then added in a mutter, "Like _that's_ ever worked before."

Harry was too intent on the feeling, the blissfully _right_ feeling this mounting conflict brought back into him, like the oven-heart of his blood finally clicked over to simmer, to roll his eyes or argue the point. He wanted to be _cooked._ "Figure it out!"

"No."

"Fight _back!"_ he screamed, lunging forward until he got a fistful of Draco's shirt and shook him, shook him _hard,_ and thrust the point of his wand under Draco's chin.

"Why?" The question was so simple and plaintive that it caught Harry off guard, or maybe it was the way Draco was _looking_ at him-- like they shouldn't be enemies anymore. Like they shouldn't be anything. Like it was all over but the moving on that Harry couldn't fucking seem to manage.

Harry shoved his wandtip forward until it pressed roughly into Draco's throat, steepling his skin hard enough to bruise. "Because I could kill you, Malfoy! Aren't you _afraid?_ Aren't you going to insult me and then run away whimpering the moment I let you go?"

"I've been through a lot worse now than _you,_ Potter," Draco snapped, and Harry felt suddenly flush with relief and adrenaline at the characteristic way Malfoy's eyes flashed, the way his mouth curved into a subtle outline of his old routine sneer when Harry's name came through it, like his mutual animosity for Harry was still buried in there, in the rote muscle memory of his lips. Like Harry was making him remember.

Harry's heart started pounding with that familiar excitement, but then Draco ruined it.

"You saved my life," Draco added quietly, and Harry's heart sank. "You kept me out of prison. You're not going to kill me."

"What if I kept you alive and out of Azkaban just so I could do you myself?" Harry snarled, but it was an empty threat and they both knew it.

"Then do it," Draco muttered.

Harry's eyes went wide.

Draco snorted. "I'm tired of fighting, Potter. I'm tired of carrying the burden of this--" His slender, pointed face twisted with the ugliest sneer yet, and it reminded Harry so much of that moment in sixth year when Malfoy broke his nose that he almost grinned, like they were somehow reminiscing, but then Malfoy's next words sobered him. "--This _stupid_ bloodfeud," he finished, tone laced with disgust. "I don't care where you came from, Potter. Why should I," he choked out a bitter, brittle laugh, "when my own past is gone now? I have... _nothing_ to be proud of anymore. I have no reason to fight."

Harry couldn't handle the way this ringing confession of utter defeat made him feel, didn't even want to address it, so he pressed his wandtip more sharply into Draco's throat and forced the Slytherin's head to tilt back. _"This_ is your reason, you prat!"

But Draco only closed his eyes. "Just do it, then," he murmured again. "Just get it over with."

The wand fell away, and Draco was not surprised, but then a rough hand enclosed his throat like a vise and he was. His startled eyes flew open to find Harry's nose nearly brushing his as the other young man began to throttle him, and he released a soft gagging sound that was supposed to be a gasp. "Pott--" was all he managed to choke out.

"I don't want it to be over with," Harry whispered into his face, breath as warm as the rest of him-- radiating heat everywhere Draco himself was cold and reserved. Harry's hand clenched tighter and Draco could feel more bruises flooding to the surface beneath those fingertips, as sharp and cutting as the wandtip had been on his sensitive skin. "I don't want to stop fighting. I _can't--_ I don't know _how."_

"Pott--" Draco rasped, he couldn't get that final syllable sound through his constricted throat, "Pott-- _Harry!"_

Harry threw him backwards like the name burned, and Draco stumbled several steps before catching his balance. He raised a hand to gingerly rub the fresh bruises, already blossoming in sickly greens and queasy purples like stains on his milky-white skin, and Harry's expression went dead when he saw what he'd done.

Malfoy wasn't on his back in a puddle of his own blood on a dirty, flooded bathroom floor, but the old guilt of inflicting sectumsempra rose through Harry like bile, just the same. "Forget I said anything," Harry muttered, his brow cutting a heavy flat line that was not quite a frown. "I'm sorry." And he turned his back on Malfoy and left the other boy standing there, staring after him in stunned, scrutinizing silence.


	4. Chapter 4

Harry 'Honorary Member of the Lonely Hearts Club' Potter had taken to visiting the Leaky Cauldron a lot, lately.

Participating in the trials was no longer the satisfyingly productive passtime it had once been, now that he no longer recognized the faces of the men and women he sent to their sentences as casually as a swipe of the hand.  A little swish to the left, prison.  A small jerk to the right, probation.  He barely listened to the charges.

They weren't Death Eaters to him, anymore; they were just... losers.  Their side had lost, and Harry 'the Savior' Potter's side had won, thanks in no small part to his own efforts, and now staring down at them from the curved bench of the courtroom stands did not feel like it was perpetuating any sort of battle at all, anymore.  It just felt like rifling through the leftovers, picking the bones dry with the hunched desperation of a carrion bird unfit to flock with the rest of society.  Cleaning up the mess.

Once the savior of the wizarding world, now its janitor.  Harry 'the Garbageman' Potter.

It felt like facing the end.

So Harry still attended the Wizengamot, because his testimony was still valuable -- because _someone_ has to do the sweeping -- but all the vitality and flavor had gone out of it for him.  It became a rote duty, just another obligation, rather than his reason for leaving Someplace Else in the mornings.

It seemed so futile to work up all that motivation just to step through the floo in order to attend each hearing, only to immediately return when the final gavel bang had sounded, that Harry decided to prolongue his outings by sipping butterbeer as slowly as possible on a Leaky Cauldron barstool.  There were no spirits that could raise his, not even magically-brewed ones, and anyway the post-war veteran-turned-depressed alcoholic was too apt a cliche for Harry to abide, but he figured one simple butterbeer a day was perfectly normal for a young man entering his prime, even expected.

Everything was always a tactic of some sort, if you tried hard enough.

Still, beneath his clever camouflage of visibly failing to socialize with others in public, Harry began to accept these mournful sojourns of his as the inevitable way of things.  An orphaned kid from a neglectful, often abusive foster household tossed into the sudden stardom of an international civil war from the beginning of his teenage years onward was bound to end up alone in a pub late at night, every night, aiming for something like amnesia at the bottom of each emptied glass but never quite swallowing enough of it to drown out the sound of his own name.  Harry 'Who the Fuck Is That' Potter.  Harry 'I Used to Be Someone Whole' Potter.

Harry broken fucking Potter.

He recalled the baffled and baffling way Dumbledore used to approach him, back when his whole world might've ended at the drop of a wand and therefore consisted only of the limitations of his own next move-- but now everything had expanded like an explosion around him and the only limit was trying to _find_ his next move in all the rubble, and Harry wasn't baffled anymore.  He knew exactly what the old man had meant when he'd suggested that Harry always seemed to take these horrendously violent and traumatizing events rather _casually._   Well, sure.  He was just a stupid fucking kid who'd been told he could do magic.  Of _course_ he had felt invincible.

The only thing that truly disturbed him was discovering that he actually _was._

Nothing made him feel weaker than knowing he had no weaknesses, because that meant--

That meant it would never get any better than this.

That meant this was _it_ for him; he'd had his moment to be full and young and magnificent and brave and heroic, and now... it was all over but the sweeping.  There would never be another war this great again, not in Harry's lifetime; there would be no more battles to give Harry purpose and direction and ultimately, release. Nothing could ever be that good again.

Which meant he would just be stuck like this, caught in this aimless, shiftless loop of dependence on constant danger to keep the pointlessness of his own power at bay, until he died of old age, useless and isolated, raving about the good 'ol days that _everyone hated_ except him.

But the world would always need janitors.  So Harry figured a janitor should become a regular at the local pub.

And that's where he glimpsed that frigid shock of white-blond hair again, for the first time in weeks.

Malfoy was sitting at the long L-shaped bar on the wrong arm of the bend, diagonally across from Harry's usual seat and with his back, unwisely, to the door through which Harry had just entered.  The majority of the friendly wizarding world was of course keen to let bygones be bygones and put the animosities of previous years behind them, Harry knew, but not everyone who had lost a loved one to the arbitrary ire of the Death Eaters felt so forgiving.  There were many witches and wizards, mostly wizards, who still harbored an implacable hunger for the kind of vengeance that only vigilantes call justice against those who had caused so much suffering, and many of them weren't too picky about whose corpses they might use to make an example.  A young, beaten, defenseless ex-follower of the Dark Arts, whose high-notoriety name had been smeared across the cover of every wizarding newspaper in the country when his wand had been confiscated, ought to be a little more careful, Harry thought.

It's not paranoia if you're actively receiving death threats, Harry thought.

All of these thoughts crossed Harry's mind in the flash of a second it took for him to angle his stride in the wrong direction, not towards his customary barstool with its back to the solid wall but instead towards that wandless, exposed young man with the sleek platinum hair whom absolutely nobody but Harry 'I Put the Stalk in Beanstalk' Potter would recognize from behind so immediately.  There were too many shadows in that dimly-lit room, and Harry couldn't quite pinpoint his own.

He snuck forward with silent footfalls and became Malfoy's instead.

"So _this_ was your big plan?" Harry murmured right into the other boy's ear, close enough that Malfoy could suddenly feel breath gusting against the back of his neck and he stiffened upright like a shot, sloshing a splash of whatever murky maroon liquid he'd been nursing over the rim of his glass.  Harry luxuriated in the vindictive swell of triumph that instantly bloomed between his ribs at having caught his long-time rival so off guard.

But instead of cowering or lashing out in response, Malfoy simply pursed his lips in displeasure at the ruddy splotches now spreading on the silken sleeve of his no doubt expensive robe.  Instead of acknowledging Harry at all, he simply reached out to snatch up a few napkins from the bar and dabbed ineffectually at the stains.

Harry gave a somewhat wry, mocking laugh as he slid onto the neighboring barstool and settled in with a sideways slouch.  "Here, let me get that for you," he declared pompously, and reversed the entire spill with an effortless wave of his wand.

Malfoy sighed, and consumed himself with setting the newly-whitened napkins neatly beneath his fancy fluted glass, stacking and arranging them just so.  "What 'big plan'?" he asked, distracted.

"The one you wouldn't tell me after your trial.  Hiding out in a pub that always catered to Order members and the like, without a wand, was maybe not the best one."

"I don't have any plans," Malfoy muttered blandly, and knocked back a large gulp from his goblet.  "And I'm not hiding."

"Yeah, well, you're _welcome,"_ Harry spat, meaningfully eyeing that glass and the stain-free arm clutching it.

"That whole situation was, literally, _entirely your fault._   Both the spill _and_ my lack of wand to address it."

"Ha!  You're welcome for _that,_ too.  If it weren't for me, you would've gotten a lot worse than a suspended wand."

"Then it wouldn't matter," Malfoy mumbled.

"Oh, how's that?"

"There'd be no wine in Azkaban to spill."

Harry went silent.  

He let the space between them fill to overflowing with his silence, potent and warm like the syrupy liquid in Malfoy's goblet, thick with too many words he couldn't find for bridging distances too wide to understand.  There was _so much_ space between them, and yet Malfoy was right there.  Close enough to touch.  Close enough to hurt.

And maybe, Harry was dimly aware, there was something still left alive inside him that wanted to.

Draco took this lack of verbal response to be an acceptable end to their chance encounter in a popular public drinking establishment.  "Potter," he said like a cordial nod.

"Malfoy."  They both turned to face the bar, putting their shoulders side-by-side in a continued silence that was certainly strained, but seemed to Harry like maybe the most comfortable thing he'd felt in months.  Maybe felt like pulling on a favorite sweater he'd believed lost until it was randomly discovered months later, crammed behind the sofa.  He ordered a butterbeer.  Malfoy sipped his wine.

The bartender moved away down the adjacent row of customers.

"I guess you're really not much of a coward anymore, are you?" was how Harry abruptly broke the silence.  It was strange almost-praise coming from him, delivered with the kind of resigned amusement that only the weariest of once-warriors can muster, when they've lost the hope for anything more.

Malfoy shrugged.  "That sort of fear has just... been beaten out of me, I suppose."  He sighed, and spun slowly, laboriously on his stool, as though it were a great tax to him, to face Harry directly.  Not proudly, not with that notably absent haughty sneer, but openly.  "What do you want, Potter?"

"I don't know."  He really didn't.  "Company, maybe."

At long last, Draco finally did sneer, but it seemed to be directed inward now, as though mocking himself rather than someone else.  "So go hang out with your _friends,"_ he snapped.  Because I'm not good enough to be one of them, that sneer added.

"They're busy," Harry said curtly.

Draco eyed him with that same piercing, shrewd gaze he'd always possessed, but this time, instead of using it to intimidate or anticipate another's personal insecurities, Harry thought he actually rather looked... like he was trying to _consider_ something.  There was a remarkable difference in Malfoy's face, and it set Harry on edge as much as it bewildered him-- but at least that was familiar territory for his emotions.

"What're you looking at?" Harry growled, pleased with the aggression he was able to inject into it.

Infuriatingly, Malfoy did not rise to the argument that was desperately playing out in Harry's head.  "Since when do Weasley and Granger not have time for _you?"_ was all he asked, and there was the same snide inflection Harry remembered from so many of Malfoy's often rhetorical insult-questions, but once again, it now sounded more like Draco was simply _skeptical,_ rather than scornful.

Harry opened his mouth, but no venomous retort came.  Instead he turned back to face the bar, cutting his profile towards the blond again, and took the mug of butterbeer between his hands.  "They always have time for me," Harry muttered into the creamy froth.

"So I ask again-- what do you _want,_ Potter?"  A pause, and then just the slightest tremble in a voice Harry knew as well as Ron's and Hermione's, as well as his own.  "With me?"

Harry took a long drink and found it unsatisfying, just like everything else in his life these days.  Just like everything but _this._   "I don't know," he grunted again, and tossed a few coins onto the counter beside his unfinished drink, and walked away.  He did know at least one thing, with absolute clarity: he'd be back tomorrow.

 

* * *

  
When Harry 'One Butterbeer Please' Potter went back to the Leaky Cauldron the next evening, Malfoy wasn't there.  

Harry walked in, glanced around without even realizing what he was searching for, and then, with a shrug, for no particular reason, for the first night in three weeks straight, decided he might pop round Ron's instead.


End file.
